Don't get him wrong, TB's a history buff and he knows it's not
that simple. While he's writing specifically in reaction to
a Marvel Comics plotline, he took the opportunity to call out the Wehraboos and dismantle the mythology surrounding
Blitzkrieg. Certainly Germany had as many skilled commanders as it had Hermann Göring and
Ratte blueprints—his point is, at the strategic level, its early victories relied as much on Allied blunders as they did OKW planning, and these Third Reich Triumphant alt-hists are a lot harder to justify than most authors like to admit.
Yeah, the piece is a polemic but I'm now going to post a commentary that explains what he's wrong about because I just can't resist.
You see, when the Germans rolled into the Sudetenland in 1938, they captured the Skoda plant in Plzeň. (So much for just wanting to ‘unite Germanic peoples’.) With Skoda, they captured hundreds of these tanks - 150 of these ‘LT vz. 38s’ and 244 smaller ‘LT vz. 35s’. They continued production at these tanks at Skoda, and had about 2000 all-up by the end of production. These were the heart of the panzer divisions - most of the German vehicles were the Panzer I and II tanks, which were armed with powerful and devastating machine guns. (Okay, the Panzer II had a 20mm cannon, but that still isn’t exactly a stellar anti-tank weapon).
By everything I can tell, this is completely false. The Czech tanks were used in the Battle of France, but they
weren't actually the "mainstay" of the Panzer divisions, at least not according to any other source I can find, most of which reference only a few hundred being used in
Fall Gelb.
In fact, the best tank in the world in 1940 wasn’t German or Czech - it was French. The Somua S35, pictured below, was well-armoured and well-armed, with it’s only major weakness being a one-man turret (which meant the commander also had to load the gun) and the lack of a radio. They could well have decisively defeated the panzers, had they not been issued piecemeal to infantry formations. There was also the British Matilda II, which was slower than continental drift but better armoured them some fortresses - again, these were largely shackled to the infantry.
I would dispute this, these tanks weren't fast enough and not having radios was a big deal, and that's why they actually couldn't have been the "best" tanks. Gun and armor aren't the only things that make a tank "good."
In a larger sense it's plain misleading to imply that because the French and British had better-armed and armored tanks, they could have beaten the Panzer divisions. The whole point there was that the Germans were a couple of steps ahead of the Western Allies in terms of operational doctrine - the coordination of all arms in a mobile campaign literally left the static-minded British and French commanders in the dust. The Germans also had vastly superior air forces, with the most technologically-advanced planes and the most experienced pilots in the world, which played a huge role in their quickly gaining air supremacy over France (which in turn was an extremely important factor in the success of the Blitzkrieg).
It is accurate that the French suffered from terrible leadership.
Also, they stopped the Germany Army outside Dunkirk in the middle of the evacuation of the British Army because Goring wanted to do it with just the Luftwaffe. The British got away.
While Goering's assurance that the Luftwaffe alone could halt the evacuation played a role, the generally overextended, overworked condition of the German troops at this point (as well as somewhat justified worries about flanking attacks cutting off the spearhead) did too. But of course we don't want to acknowledge that because that would give Hitler credit for some sense.
German commanders willingly cooperated with the Einsatzgruppen and the SS in the extermination of Jews and communists in the Ukraine and Belarus. There was nothing noble or honorable about the German Army in the western USSR. I really cannot emphasize this enough.
Obviously, this is quite correct, though there were a few notable (and, in my view, at least somewhat noble) exceptions.
This meant that by the time the Germans invaded, the professional heart of the Red Army had been ripped out, replaced with cowed and terrified yes-men who were not competent in army command.
Ironically, this is what the Germans thought at the time, and they were wrong. The effects of the purges have been overstated. They weren't helpful, obviously, but they also didn't completely neuter the Red Army as a fighting force.
Not to be outdone on the military mistake-making front, Hitler began to make catastrophic mistakes of his own. The first was to bring his allies. While this might seem like a good idea on paper, it was terrible in practice. The Italian Army, for example, was in terrible shape - they seemed to exist primarily to look good in parades before Mussolini. They had performed no major training exercises before entering the war in 1940, and it was actually noted that all forms of training, basic or otherwise, seemed to outright stop for the winter. Many Italian soldiers were sent to the front with weapons they had never even seen before, never mind been shown how to use. And incredibly, they were probably the best of Germany’s allies in Barbarossa (apart from the Finns). Their allies from Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria were even worse, largely due to budgetary concerns, the whims of tin-pot dictators and poor morale after joining Germany’s war.
The allies were still better than nothing, so portraying use of allied troops as a "mistake" is just comically wrong.
Mistake two was failure of intelligence. In September 1941, the Germans suddenly encountered the T-34 and KV-1 tanks, which were far better than anything they had. These were thoroughly modern tanks, and they took the Germans completely by surprise. Which is mind-boggling, considering they’d sent officers to watch them being tested in 1940. Apparently Germany just lost this information or something. Germany wouldn’t have a really effective counter to these tanks until early 1943. So much for the vaunted Panzerwaffe.
The real intelligence failure was the drastic underestimation of the Red Army's strength, reserves, and manpower pool, which continued essentially until the end of the battle of Kursk at which point basically everyone with half a clue knew the Germans were utterly screwed.
As a more minor point, it's simply not true that the Germans lacked an effective counter to the T-34 and KV. They lacked a tank that could fight either one on equal terms, but- as was the case in France - their operational doctrine more than made up for that. And in any case the standard German tactic against armor was to use the mobile anti-tank guns with the Panzer divisions to destroy enemy tanks, with the German tanks playing the role of bait to lure them into ambushes against a
Pakfront.
But mistake number four? The biggest mistake? Invading the USSR in the first place.
This I agree with, but this is like saying that Hitler lost the war by starting it. Which is true, because Germany's strategic position in World War II was all but impossible. Which is, ultimately, why they lost.
Their only victories were against small countries or armies that were badly led.
This isn't really true, and in any case the Germans were still achieving very favorable casualty ratios in 1943-45, against well-led and much better-equipped and -supplied Allied armies. The reason is that the German Army had a level of operational competence that just wasn't matched by the Allied armies except in a few instances. The most obvious place this can be seen is in the quality of the German staff work, which handily surpassed that of the Allied armies even unto the end of the war. One obvious point: the Germans, outnumbered and in many cases outgunned, managed to overwhelm the Western Allies in 1940 in a campaign lasting close to six weeks, while the Western Allies in 1944-5, despite facing a bunch of old men and kids, and something like a couple of hundred German tanks on the Western Front, took
almost a whole year to push into Germany and win the damn war.
) and Belgium, and got encircled by german use of tank-only groups and better ground-air coordination. So Germany was lucky in how it defeated France and forced Britain to evacuate in that phase of the war.
(well, a bit unfair here, but i think you can see the underlying issue; namely i view this as a bit dangerous)
)
